Contemporary Art Projects USA  will be part of the 19th Edition of Art Palm Beach Art Fair. Under the curatorial guidance of Silvia Medina, Chief Curator, the Gallery, Booth #106,  will feature the following artists.

Invited Artist|Venezuelan Master|Luis Alberto Hernandez/Venezuela

Series Nomada

Luis Alberto Hernández (b. 1950, Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela) has studied in depth sacred traditions such as occult philosophy, spiritual legacies, initiatory experiences, and alchemy, Divine symbols that have given great spiritual insight throughout his artistic reflection.

His artistic idea enters different modes of religious expression, to end in a metaphor of the sacred that he has agreed to be defined as a Poetry of the Sacred. His creations are far from classical conceptions. They are linked to the valuation of religious emotion in closer proximity to an original vision of the world as sacred revelation, experienced as a mystery and never as knowledge. “Poetry of the Sacred”, “Ceremonial”, “Epiphanies” “Sacred scriptures”, “Ritual Scriptures”, “Enchantment”, “Devotion”, “Theophanies”, “Offerings”, “Spirit and Memory” are some titles of exhibition projects since 1989 identify the artist’s intention to build a connection metaphorically sacred.

Some of his most important solo exhibits includes The Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France (1996); Konstanz University in Germany (1997); Wissenschaftszentrum in Bonn, Germany (1997); Centre Civic Pati Llimona in Barcelona, Spain (1999); Centre Culturel Jacques Brel in Thionville, France (2000); the Haus Völker und Kulturen Museum in Bonn, Germany (2000); at the Museum of Art of Gerona in Spain (2001); at the UNESCO in Paris, France (2002); the intervention of the Crypt of the Santa Eugenia Church, during the XIV Festival of Biarritz in France (2005); and the Cloitre des Billettes, Paris in France (2009).
Forthcoming exhibitions:  Cluny Museum, Bourgogne, France 2016.

Established and Emerging Artists: 

Jorge Cavelier|Colombia

Jorge Cavelier was born in Bogotá, Colombia. After a brief incursion in architecture and a year of painting at New York University, Jorge Cavelier traveled to study in Florence, Italy in the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze where he finished his BFA in 1982. Returning to Colombia the same year he founded “Trazo” an open studio in Bogotá. He worked and taught painting techniques there until 1987. His painting style depends on the technique he uses. He also uses the same techniques that the old masters used to prepare the canvas, and best kinds of oils suited for the painting.

After 1988, he painted in his private studio in Colombia until June 1999, the year he was kidnapped by the guerrilla group “FARC” in Colombia. Released in 2000, he traveled to the U.S. where he decided to migrate. After being granted with an “extraordinary ability” permanent residence visa, he relocated in the city of Key Biscayne, FL where he has been living and working for the last 12 years.

He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions since 1983 in Bogotá and Santa Marta, Colombia; New York and South Hampton, NY; Miami and Tallahassee, FL; Chicago, IL; Atlanta, GA; Quito, Ecuador; Lima, Perú, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Montevideo, Uruguay; Caracas, Venezuela; Seravezza, Florence, and Rome, Italy; Tokyo, Japan; and Pretoria, South Africa.

Jorge Cavelier|Colombia|Monumental Sculpture

His first sculpture series came to light in 2007. Exhibitions of those works where shown in Miami, FL in 2007, Bogotá, Colombia, in 2008, and New York, N.Y. in 2011. Nowadays, he works on his series of paintings and sculptures “Labyrinths”, to be shown in private and public spaces in Colombia and the U.S.

Maria Fernanda Lairet||Venezuela

The digital revolution has given birth to visual techniques and languages that have opened doors to new dimensional realities where space and time have stopped being the final frontiers, as cyberspace has exponentially broadened the horizon. This transformation is reflected in Maria Fernanda Lairet’s work – composed of ethereal mural subjects and the conversion of paper money to a virtual reality that synthesizes the economic icons and the culture that gravitate toward globalization; as well as the tension of diversity. This contemporary atmosphere is generating an unedited notion of human culture, an echo of the planetary conscience that conflicts with regionalism and isolation.

With this language, fused with digital photography and the manipulation of the software that opens new possibilities to creativity – in Latin America – Lairet has created an echo within this dimensions of reality via virtual collage. These works are integrated by esthetic layers through a complex process of experimentation and conceptualization, employing geometrics in a manner that the frame disappears into a void, and transparencies create visual dimensions that lead the viewer to a sort of neo-cynicism.

Maria Fernanda avoids fastidious expressionism by introducing colors that harmonize with the mandalas, in her basic technique of photography, as well as in her digital collages; the new technologies allowing the creative to have an immediate vision of the end result, making it possible to mingle into the same discourse the wished for and the realized; as is the case with her series of the salt beds of Uyini, Bolivia, where nature performs in primeval landscapes; the salt bed a gigantic mirror reflecting the sky and earth embracing; re-enforcing the esthetic impact of each of the photographs taken, turning each instance into a creative ritual. The paper money icon collages seeking the essence of reality –  its sacred dimension –  and introducing the elements that transmit the cosmic apathy and the mystery of the origin of life. The whole is united with the portion with the same finality, turning it into the esthetic of knowledge and visual poetry.

Dr. Eduardo Planchart Licea
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Profesor de la Universidad Simón Bolivar

Current Exhibition: Fusion Miami and Art Design Gallery/
Miami Dade College/Doral/FL
January 2016-April 2016.

Grace Berge|USA

With an absolute love for nature and a background in art therapy and observation, I combine my passions for photography, nature, discovery, and exploration to create imagery. The specifics and details of what I observe blend together in my mind’s eye, and it is that blending, that compilation and abstraction of specific moments, that I hope to capture in my current body of work. If I had to put words to it, I might call it “post-modern neo-impressionism”, but what it really amounts to is a combining and softening of environment and time into images that I hope encompass many moments, many thoughts, many feelings. The images I create – in-camera, sans digital manipulation – simplify what the bare eye sees, turning it into what we perceive when we look with a softer gaze, observing the essence rather than the specifics. It is a kind of minimalism, a reduction into sheer line, color, and movement, that represents something unclear which nevertheless feels familiar and recognizable. My photographs may take the viewers into an ethereal, tranquil, otherwordly place, one that prompts us to question our assumptions and find new answers. It is my sincere hope that these images inspire others to look more deeply into our natural world, to find in it, as I do, serenity and healing

Maria Ana Davila|Mexico

Reflexions on water are the thoughts, meditations, ruminations, joy and love, that each of us reflects from oneself. It is completely personal; it is ourselves looking deep inside, with our own contrasts, focused or unfocused, with our pale or vivid memories, our shadows, lights and sharp edges. We can be quiet or stormy water but there is always beauty.

Through organic abstract art I see that we form part of nature, just as we are stardust, drops of water or reflexions on water. We are unique and unrepeatable the same way the water captured in an instant. It will never be the same, I can never repeat the same instant with the same reflection again, and we are like this.

I can see my reflexions on water…

Samah El Hage|Sweden

Series People

“When we are born, we are born with an empty blank paper with no definition of who we are. The paper is then filled up with our own story, our life decisions, the many roads and journeys we make. Each person has their own unique history built up from the choices we make and the different experiences we’ve had such as love, happiness, courage and regrets. My photography work for the theme “people” explores and gives insight to the story behind the person in the artwork. I want to awaken and leave the viewer with a glimpse of an emotional feeling with a
blend of creativity of their personality.

Fermin Fleites|Cuba

This sculpture is a re-creation of a key symbol of humanity’s great religions throughout history; a symbol that demarcates the birth of symbolic sacrifice, and simultaneously its disruption. The lamb is present in Abraham son’s sacrifice, but this is not the first time that it was introduced, as it has been present as a metaphor of great transcendence for obedience, constancy, sacrifice, and resurrection since Paleo Cristian art.

In present times, the lamb appears in Jewish liturgy, the Muslim “Eid Al Adha’, as a base for Christian rituals, and also in some Hindu mantras such as “Upanishad”.

“El Ganador” is supported by a rod from the New York to Key West railroad built by Flagler, which was to eventually reach Havana.

This sculpture is a metaphor of the constancy of re-inventing, and of the attitudes that make great changes possible.

Kelly Fischer|Switzerland

Scaffolding allows me to break up my creative process into chunks of raw, exposed color. It provides me with the tools to write my own script, layer upon layer on an empty canvas.

During Art Basel week in Miami 2015 I was able to present several pieces of artwork  that showcased the first phase of “Scaffolding I”.

Scaffolding II is the second phase and there is a deeper concentration devoted to smoothing over the rough edges and to beatify. By combining colors that represent both the Northern Lights and Southern Lights, my intention is to present artwork that offers an entrancing, dramatic, magical display that fascinates.

Next Exhibition: Indians Wells Spectrum/California

Maquiamelo|Colombia

VANITY OF VANITIES, ALL IS VANITY

Maquiamelo’s work has the power to simultaneously awaken all different types of considerations. The Divas, the latest of his series, in which he employs a head shrinking technique to portray Hollywood stars, not only makes us reconsider the meaning of the artistic resurrection of a pre-Columbian practice and its connotations of rebellion against the history of art, but it also leads us to meditate on topics like the relativity of aesthetics, the power of the film language, the vast knowledge of people considered primitive, the futility of the tinsel, and the critical ability of art.

Another topic is the role of figurative sculpture in the contemporary artistic field.  After statuary, and the aspirations of a foolproof modernist originality, figurative sculpture seemed to retreat before the onslaught of the installations and the readymades.  In recent times, though, there have been artists like Maquiamelo who conceptually confronts sculpture as a way to transmit knowledge, to communicate ideas and meanings, and as a starting point for the exploration of values within an extensive social panorama.  His work represents not just a vindication, but a reinvention and a redefinition of figurative sculpture, and also an inquiring look into uncharted artistic and social arguments that are relevant, nowadays, to convey through the three-dimensional representation of the human figure.

His Divas are not beautiful anymore, for now they are unarguably dead, humiliated, turned into repulsive though suggestive and intriguing objects; and this is the way the viewer gets introduced.  These are works with a high symbolic value that could be related to the Vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as they clearly allude to vanity, to the emptiness and insignificance of beauty, and the fortune or power of the certainty of death.  These are works, therefore, that combine the validity of an enduring content with an experimental spirit that thrives languages, not just extra-artistic, but peripheral, highlighting a huge creative and expressive freedom, the main characteristic of contemporary art.

Eduardo Serrano
Curator and Art Critic

Next Exhibition: Museum of Contemporary Art|Puerto Rico

Motoko Oyamada|Japon 

As a mother of one son, I feel that I’m still filled with tenderness of my late mother and supported by her in some way. Everyone is living for today by the supported of the great love from their mother. I want to believe, the love of mother could build up peaceful world.

My works describe those feelings by the stroke of the paint brush and the colors and lines by inspiration.

She has participated on International exhibitions as  ART Concept DEN – “Made in Japan”, Berlin, Germany, 2014, Art Market at the Kyobashi K’s Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, 2014 and the M.A.D. Gallery , Italy, 2015.

Eliel Perez|Puerto Rico

As an artist I strive to express the world I see onto the media that I paint to motivate, inspire, and stimulate other human minds to see the world as I do. My works inspiration is a combination of daily elements that are combined to form unrigged and flexible images. I combine multiple materials of construction that allows me to free my ideas and create freely without material restrictions and in a freer flowing manner.

​Martin Schoffel|Venezuela

A Venezuelan-Austrian artist  he dedicates his life to create kinetic Art.

At a very young age Martin Schoffel discovers his love for art and starts working with freehand geometric drawings. After several years, his art turned into a passion for geometric and kinetic art.

At the beginning of his artistic career he uses simple materials like paper and pencil, later his interest for colors grows as well as for new materials such as wood, acrylics, aluminum and photography among others.

This experience enhances his work and reinforces his desire to create movement effects in his art with overlaid elements and edited images. As a result we find his pieces framed into the so-called Kinetic Art.

For More Information about the artists please email to: info@contemporaryartprojectsusa.com

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